The simplest definition of “sacred” in the Oxford English Dictionary has always seemed to me to be “set apart,” and that’s probably why I’ve never felt very happy with the word. I’ve never much liked the idea of things being “set apart.” Somehow, in my staunchly Republican family, I acquired a stubborn egalitarianism. But I grew up in places that I’ve recently come to think of as sacred. I grew up in vacant lots.
That term needs some explanation for anyone much younger than I. In the 1940s and ‘50s, even in a prosperous suburb right next to Chicago such as I grew up in, you would find plots of property – sometimes whole square blocks – that weren’t built upon, or cared for, or fenced off. They were commonly known as “vacant lots” in those days. Somebody probably owned them, but whoever owned them didn’t feel any urgency about turning them into something other than a piece of land. They were left alone and untended and unimproved. Somebody owned them, but the somebody wasn’t around, and so everyone owned them; every kid, anyway.
Those vacant lots were where I grew up. I rode my version of Hopalong Cassidy’s horse through them, through dead weeds sprouting in the early snow, rescuing maidens tied to trees naked for obscure reasons. I drove my dog sled through them in the winter, on the lookout for the wolves and lynx and beaver and wolverine I’d seen only in books, and I saw them there. I dug underground forts there with my buddies, and made a baseball diamond where we played every day for three or four summers, running uphill to first and second, downhill to third and home. And I hunted butterflies in them.
I can’t remember what got me hunting butterflies. It certainly wasn’t science class in school. But I remember that I learned to make a cheesecloth net from a circled coat hanger wired to a broomstick, and to stalk and hunt and kill those butterflies. If the fields I hunted still existed, I could tell you where the black swallowtails would be found in the middle of July, and where, just around the end of August, you might luck up on a Buckeye, a beautiful, rare treasure.
And I learned as well how to kill and mount the butterflies I hunted. This I learned from books I found at the library. You killed them by chloroforming them in a mason jar you got from your mother. You’d soak a piece of cotton with a common household cleaner of those days, containing acetone, and pop your butterfly out of the net into the jar, cap it, and the butterfly would promptly be overwhelmed by the fumes, sink down to the cotton at the bottom of the jar, and eventually topple to its side. Then it was important to remove it promptly, or it would absorb the poison and lose its vibrant color.
And you didn’t want that, because you had to frame it. By the time I was ten, the walls of my room were pretty well covered with framed butterflies mounted on cotton sheets behind glass: one frame for wood nymphs, one for swallowtails, one for sulfurs, one for the occasional Cecropia or Luna Moth who’d come into the night too early.
I didn’t like the killing. I so much didn’t like it , watching those beautiful pieces of life and air and summer die soaking up poison, that I dispensed with the chloroform jar after a while, and went to trapping the caught butterflies in a pinch of netting and squeezing their heads off. That seemed more humane to me, as a lad of eight or nine. And so my later frames were filled with headless but otherwise perfect butterflies.
I loved the butterflies I hunted and killed. Their beauty, their various styles of flight and rest, their wonderful silence – I loved them. I never questioned why I was killing and keeping them.
I never questioned, either, why someone would own a lovely little city block and leave it alone, leave it to nature in the middle of a great, thriving, dynamic, growing city that would be glad to provide the owner with a whole lot of dollars in exchange for it. Such an owner, today, would be declared mad and institutionalized and divested of his property in about a second and a half. His family would take care of that job, if the city government couldn’t manage it first.
When I was taking those butterflies, I was even madder. I saw something I loved, something in the natural world, and I wanted it all for myself, and I took it, and I kept it in my room, where only I could look at it. I owned those butterflies.
I owned them because I’d learned how to take them out of nature, how to keep them from escaping by killing them, and how to preserve their bodies so that they looked like they’d looked when I’d been hunting them. Except they couldn’t move, so I could really see them, as you never can see anything alive.
And nobody else could see them. I went into those vacant lots and took what I wanted out of them for my own personal collection. One less tiger swallowtail for Tommy Meyers to ignore; one less Mourning Cloak to land suddenly on Carol White’s outstretched hand. Tough. They were my swallowtails and mourning cloaks.
I guess I’m telling you all this unimportant personal history because it looks like to me that I was a perfect representative of my kind. I was given a little world full of the richness of creation, a little world that was freely available to every other kid in the neighborhood, a little world we shared without very much conflict at all, and what I learned from my culture to do with that was to mine it for my own use. To find what appealed to me and take it. Not to share my appreciation. To own.
And I think now that that is the heart of the madness of my culture – the idea of ownership, of possession. I loved the butterflies I killed. It was an infant’s love, the desire to be one with the beloved. It was a child’s love, the desire to control access to the beloved. It was a killing love.
And it was made possible by the sacred places in which I was privileged to grow up. Nature allowed me to pillage nature. Nature called no immediate penalty. Nature was busy being nature, and nature expects some losses. And whoever “owned” the land didn’t exert ownership with steel fences and armed guards.
I think now of those wonderful little fields and woods in the middle of the city where I grew up, and I mourn for most of our children, who have no such places to play in and learn that there is a world far greater and more complicated and more savage and more real than they can hope to understand, but might hope to worship – that is, to love without lust to own or improve it.
Each night, I take my two old dogs to the last vacant lot in America. It is a quarter acre a few blocks from my house, part of the property owned by a grade school. It has been left unimproved for many years. It borders on a creek known as “Shooks Run.” A hurricane fence protects it, and the kids who no longer play in it, from the street that runs along its western edge. Some nights it is covered with crows. Weeds flower there, and there is a little grove of unregulated trees — locusts, elms, a few spruces — on its eastern edge, along the creek bank. One recent night I saw two young foxes there. My dogs are now so old they didn’t even notice them.
I’ve seen butterflies there that I’ve never seen before in my life. It is a sacred place for me, a place where my dogs and I can go and walk without worrying about cars, where I can go without having to listen to anything much but how the trees move in the evening wind. There are plans afoot for its improvement into a park with a baseball field upon which no children will play. They will be home watching television or up at the highway motels doing drugs.
The idea of the sacred has been obliterated in my culture by the ideology of capitalism, which in part asserts that nothing has value unless it’s been altered by human activity and so can be sold at a profit. That concept is known as “value added,” and faith in it is now so universal that nobody even needs to even discuss it.
I think we need to talk about it, to question it. Is a world in which literally nothing is sacred a world we want to leave to our children? Or can we begin, somehow, to reassert that some things, some places, some human activities are far too valuable to have a price put on them, far too precious to be bought and sold?
In a famous quote from the Vietnam War, an American major who’d been involved in the obliteration of the village of Ben Tre explained, “It became necessary to destroy the village in order to save it.” That statement encapsulated the American strategy in Vietnam, and it encapsulates our attitude, then and now, toward anything that asserts, however silently, its right to stand apart from the engines of “improvement,” “progress,” and “value added.”
I believe it is time we set out to save the village in order to save it.
